• About

LIVEdigitally

Who's going to solve the mega photo library problem?

Posted on July 28, 2010 by Jeremy Toeman

Despite adopting digital cameras in the late 90’s, I managed to lose my pre-2003 library somewhere along the way (hence my quintuple backups, including online and offsite copies). That said, I have over 15,000 digital pictures in my iPhoto library, and average 300 or so new images per month, not to mention the videos stored along side them. At this point, the library is so large it’s right on the edge of being completely unusable.

Scrolling through images? Useless. Manually creating albums? If I don’t do it as I sync the camera, it never happens. Events? Nearly worthless. Browsing through photos on my Xbox? Actually impossible. About all I know is I DO have safe backups, and if I’m willing to scroll enough, the photos are all there to view, print, etc. Which I basically never do.

Further, the actual size of my library is now so big (125gb) I had to move it to a USB drive. And as cameras continue to improve, or as people adopt more DSLRs and video recording devices, collection sizes will grow out of manageable sizes.

And this is a problem that actually notably worsens every month.

So what’s to be done about it? Here’s what I propose:

1) Photo management tools must become capable of comprehending multiple file storage locations.
A user should be able to divvy up their collection across local, USB, and networked drives, and have clear comprehension of how to manage this. Maybe I keep my “recent” and “favorites” on the laptop, the “last year” on a USBdrive, and all the rest on a networked drive (or secondary USB drive, or both). Further, this must be implemented in such a way that a user can easily figure out where stuff is, in a non-technical fashion.

2) Photo tools must have independent, intelligent, automatic, redundant backup services
There are no files I have that are more important to me than my pictures. In fact, my photos become *more* important over time, and as the collections grow, *more* likely to have problems (data corruption, loss, etc). Backup should not be an afterthought, it should be a required element of the environment – plus it’s a great upsell opportunity for virtually all involved providers. On a related note, the management tools should effectively inventory my entire collection, and warn me if any given subset is at risk.

3) The introduction of new photo organization paradigms
While all the apps do effectively decent jobs at creating events, albums, albums within albums, folders, timelines, tags, favorites, and more, it’s simply not enough.  Which makes sense, given that in all reality, this is a problem the photo world hasn’t really faced before for typical users.  In the past, the only people with tens of thousands of photos were professional photographers, who never really need to manage or even access all of them simultaneously.  The digital photo management world is only slightly more powerful than print photo albums and shoeboxes full of pictures.  We need new concepts in how we’ll organize pictures (and incidentally, making users tag them, is not the answer).  I’m personally still noodling on the concept, and have yet to come up with something – but I trust there are better data/knowledge management folks out there than myself.

4) Video must become a side-by-side feature to photo management
Whether it’s video capture built into a digital camera or a standalone device like a Flip, users are increasingly creating video libraries.  And much like our photo libraries, the files are disorganized, not easily searchable, and have no strong mechanisms for organization beyond simple file/folder/date concepts.   Since there’s a high likelihood of people creating even more videos in the future than they do today, this problem must be addressed in parallel to the photo one.

There it is, my “manifesto” for personal photo management software.  Looking forward to seeing the future of iPhoto, Picasa, and other mainstream tools for what is clearly an impending mainstream problem!

Share this:

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Reddit

Related

Posted in General | Tags: digital cameras, iPhoto, photos, Picasa, usability | 8 Comments
« How to Turn On FaceTime on iPhone 4
Excited About Judging pre-CES i-Stage Event! »

8 thoughts on “Who's going to solve the mega photo library problem?”

  1. Joshua Weinberg says:
    July 28, 2010 at 10:48 pm

    Lightroom does just about everything you mentioned. I will demo for you tomorrow.

    Reply
  2. Eric N. says:
    July 29, 2010 at 12:10 am

    Does light room also allow you to have multiple photo sets in multiple locations?

    I have sets prior to 2007, 2007-2009, and 2010… precious baby pix.

    Eric

    Reply
  3. Double-T says:
    July 29, 2010 at 4:05 am

    Do you really have all those pics in one folder? I divide mine into folders for each year. That at least helps some.
    The storage problem, at least on site, hasn’t become a problem due to cheap HDDs. Same with off site. I can make a backup on a portable drive and leave it at work.
    I do agree with your other points about photo/video management.
    Wonder how many files we’ll have in another 5-10 years. Then at some point we have to turn all that stuff over to the kids and then it’s their problem.

    Reply
  4. Ben says:
    July 29, 2010 at 5:14 am

    As a father with 12k photos myself, I couldn’t agree more. The one thing I will add is how frustrating it was to upgrade to the iPhone 4 since I had to wait 90 minutes for it to “re-optimize” my 12k photos. At the same time though, it is pretty awesome to have every single digital photo I’ve ever taken in my pocket at all times.

    Reply
  5. Clay Loveless says:
    July 29, 2010 at 7:25 am

    Aren’t you essentially talking about Aperture 3? The multi-storage device request is handled by Aperture’s “Library Chooser” …. Aperture supports video libraries easily. For backup, you should be using BackBlaze for this. It’s set-it-and-forget-it easy, and dirt cheap.

    Reply
  6. tivoboy says:
    July 29, 2010 at 7:48 am

    yeah, I was just going to say lightroom will do a lot of this, but for a general user it is both expensive and has a relatively STEEP learning curve compared to the iphoto solution that many have. taking about 10K “snaps” a year, I find I really have to cull them when I TRANSFER them, making it pretty easy to get the actual numbers down and the actual VALUE up. I also categorize in “albums” based on three criteria.

    Would I PRINT this? I don’t have to print it, but it is print quality. These make for the best slideshows. This stays local most of the time, but of course gets backed up.

    Would I want to LOOK/SHOW this. Maybe the lighting isn’t right, or the subject isn’t in the perfect position but it SHOWS something that I want to have in my slideshows. Stays local, gets backed up

    Is there something in the picture, not included in the two above categories, that I need to SAVE? Scores from a game, a sign in a foreign land, who was at a meeting, or some form of content that I could leverage across another picture. A bridge shot where I don’t want ALL the people on it, but I’m going to ADD some specific people, etc. This stuff moves straight to an external drive.

    There ARE some third party tools/applications that let one do a similar type of multi-library plan with iphoto, just don’t know the name off hand.

    Reply
  7. Justin Korn says:
    July 30, 2010 at 3:45 pm

    As a few have already mentioned, there are tools that do everything you have requested above (I personally use Lightroom), they are just not mainstream and will never be comparable to iPhoto.

    You do have a good point on photo organization and the need for something new. However, we are so wrapped up around using tags, I don’t see the photo world breaking out loose of that anytime soon.

    I’d love to see another method of organization surface, but until then, my 350GB of photos (and growing) are tagged and organized with the tools LightRoom has provided me and I seem to be able to access what I need, when I need without a problem. The key is to come up with a very strict organization schema and having the ability to stick with it.

    Reply
  8. Adam Finkelstein says:
    August 12, 2010 at 1:09 pm

    Jeremy, I have had to wrestle with a bunch of these issues doing support for my father. He is an amateur, borderline professional, who takes thousands of photos per trip, and is an incredible photographer. His trip to India netted 8000 photos in one shot (12 mp DLSR Canon shots). I thought about moving him to another program (like Aperature, which is much better designed to handle professional work (including space taken up by editing photos), but while my father is fairly tech saavy, most of the other software is pretty complex, even for very knowledgeable photo enthusiast. Instead, I kept him on what he knows well (iPhoto) but then used a program called “iPhoto Library Manager” (http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/) to create multiple iPhoto libraries and launch them when needed. We basically got this down to a procedure where each year we make a new library (and sometimes for each major trip they take). It works well and keeps photo numbers more manageable — mirrored to a separate HD for backup using Chronosync.

    Reply

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About

Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.

Recent Posts

  • Back on the wagon/horse?
  • 11 Tips for Startups Pitching Big Companies
  • CES 2016: A New Role
  • Everything I Learned (So Far) Working For a Huge Company
  • And I’m Back…

Archives

Pages

  • About

Archives

  • January 2019
  • April 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • May 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • June 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • December 2005
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005
  • July 2005
  • June 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • February 2005
  • January 2005
  • December 2004
  • November 2004
  • October 2004
  • September 2004

Categories

  • Convergence (81)
  • Gadgets (144)
  • Gaming (19)
  • General (999)
  • Guides (35)
  • LD Approved (72)
  • Marketing (23)
  • Mobile Technology (111)
  • Networking (22)
  • No/Low-tech (64)
  • Product Announcements (85)
  • Product Reviews (109)
  • That's Janky (93)
  • Travel (29)
  • Video/Music/Media (115)
  • Web/Internet (103)

WordPress

  • Log in
  • WordPress

CyberChimps WordPress Themes

© LIVEdigitally
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.